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Marriage: Sacred Or Smashed Institution?

Committed relationships are under attacked proclaims Time magazine's cover story.

In the cover story for this week's Time magazine, Caitlin Flanagan writes about what she deems the assault of marriage and the loss of the American ideal.

Lately, we've been hearing other views—that the tumultuous economic times would inspire searches for committed relationships.

Yet, Flanagan takes very recent examples from wedded history and lists the affairs that have occurred one after the next (Mark Sanford, governor of South Carolina, Senator John Ensign of Nevada, John Edwards, Jon of Jon and Kate, and more).Divorce 101

Flanagan calls it as she sees it. These were selfish acts; these men knew what they were getting into every time they hit send on their keyboard. She guesses that as the steamy affairs were unfolding, the men were having the time of their lives.

According to Flanagan's research, Americans have more partners than ever before and more couples experience shorter cohabitation relationships. Furthermore, both marriages and divorces are frequent. She goes on to write, "An increasingly fragile construct depending less and less on notions of sacrifice and obligation than on the ephemera or romance and happiness as defined by and for its adult principals, the intact, two-parent family remains our cultural ideal, but it exists under constant attack." Read the whole story here.

Readers, do you agree that the marriage construct is suddenly under attack?